Mr Kieran Holmes is the Commissioner General of Burundi's Revenue Authority (OBR). East African Business Week's Walter Isenged held an exclusive interview with Mr. Holmes in Bujumbura Burundi. Below are excerpts.

Tell me a us a little about yourself?

I have been in Burundi since Mid July. I was working in Yemen, Rwanda and now I am here to improve revenue collection.

What were your achievements in Rwanda?

I reduced the number of advisors and built the capacity of the revenue authority.

Revenue collection has improved from dependence on external resources to 86% financing of its recurrent budget and 52% of the overall budget.

How are you establishing Burundi Revenue Authority?

We are now at the initial stage of the development. We have recruited a senior management team and next we shall recruit about 400 staff at the lower level. The intention is to professionalise the tax operations. We are establishing offices through taxpayer segmentation.

We have asked the government to put in place tax procedures to ease management. The intention is to put as much of the tax responsibility, the tax liability for Burundi onto domestic taxes and to ease the burden on trade taxes which is in line with EAC policies.

We want to set up the ASYCUDA system as has been used in Uganda, Rwanda and Tanzania and the current idea is to upgrade the ASYCUDA to the ASYCUDA ++ programme and so on.

How similar would this system comply with those in the East African Community (EAC)?

You look primarily to the business needs of a country, but the Revenue Authorities of East Africa are similar in structure and outlook. The thing about Burundi is that it's tradition is different from the other E.A countries and with the exception of Rwanda, come from the common law background whereas Burundi has a civil law background, so in one sense the Revenue Authority is a bit of an unusual concept and it is also a challenge for us to make it work within a civil law background.

What is the role of the EAC in this?

What we are looking at first of all is a modern tax law, tax environment, VAT, pretty much all the other countries in EAC have something like that. The tax laws in Burundi, with IMF support will be very similar to what we have in the EAC. The basic tax principles remain the same. The intention is to encourage trade across borders. Tax harmonisation is very important in the EAC.

In Burundi we intend to broaden the tax base as much as we can and keep the tax rates as low as we can. And then at some stage in the future the EAC will have to have an agreed double taxation agreement for income tax purposes and harmonise their indirect taxes like VAT and excise rates and have a seamless tax rate across the EAC.

When will all this be achieved?

The legislation time frame is outside our control, but the computerisation is ongoing, I would hope that we would begin computerising domestic taxes in September and computerising border posts in October.

VAT will be fully computerised in Jan 2011. We have a temporary system now. We shall have a tax identification system which will be unique to each tax payer that has all the bio data of the tax payer.

We have problems with NIF (Tax Identification numbers) These are currently a problem, they are being re-used in certain cases.

My overall hope is that taxpayers will like what we will offer.

We will introduce a level playing field and certainty of tax administration.

The system will reward the honest taxpayer and punish the dishonest. We will also punish dishonest tax officials.

What are the challenges?

We had very weak revenue collection procedures. We are re-designing these and incorporating security features in our documents, e.g. receipt books we shall print a year's supply from abroad with DFID assistance, making our books very hard to counterfeit.

My short term objective is to get 100% tax compliance in all taxes among the large taxpayers.

Then we can introduce a gold card that will allow the compliant taxpayers easy access through customs, post declaration etc that will boost the genuine businesses. In this way we can create a good partnership with the business community.